Chapter 1

People in this chapter

Places in this chapter

Artefacts in this chapter

Glossary in this chapter

Passages

It is, it must be said, a peculiarly incongruous arrangement of bricks and pantiles and concrete and glass, the edifice in which for so many years has dwelt this most Edwardian of eminences. That is to say: a … er … squat bungalow crouching alongside the main road into Mangotsfield. Beyond the ugly brick wall, and the corroded and wilting wrought iron gates, traffic greyly snarls. Between the gates and the bungalow lies a broad and unkempt expanse of gravel, with dotted about here and there some statuary - fairly putrid, it must be conceded - and one or two desultory attempts at trees. The bungalow itself has pretensions, not to be dismissed out of hand withal again vey desultory, to a sort of faux-ranch effect. The two or three gestures towards art deco falter ludicrously of course, although not so as to make a person cringe. There is a profusion of plants in pots in various stages of exuberance and disarray and exhaustion, and upon the roof, a dizzying quantity of little windmills turn when the wind blows, and slumber when it does not. The back garden boasts a diminutive summer house with, upon its roof, a further quantity of these and like contraptions; and Miss Minerva Ledwitch has also seen fit to install, inadequately screened it needs saying from the third party gaze, a hot tub, and in this Charybis doth the nymph disport herself according as the fancy taketh her. — Herod, Mangotsfield

Today, however, is not a day of disport for this particular nymph. The Edwardian aspect of Minerva Ledwitch, alluded to a moment since, manifests itself in the sheer quantity and voluminousness of her clothing: such an array of petticoats and whalebone and kaftans and cloaks and chemises and culottes and leggings and stays and mantles and girdles and skirts and underskirts as would, were it not so, be considered beyond all possibility of together clothing a single frame, the effect - sartorix supersarta! - being if anything accentuated by the Virginia Lupine coiffure inefficiently held in check by the wide-awake hat. Thus encumbered, Miss Ledwitch perspires as copiously as may be supposed, and vents her more D.H.Lawrentian aspect by means of an earthy acceptance of this propensity as the ineluctable Lot of the Crone having embarked upon her Wise Years. — Virginia Lupine coiffure

Wandering in abstraction from room to room, back and forth Minerva goes, her stays rustling, the nylon elements of her equipage chafing together, and ever and anon producing forks of lightning. At length, finding herself in the small utility room in the lean-to attaching after the fashion of buttock to the bungalow’s rear, her gaze falls on the back door, and an icy front passes across her seeping face. She gives a vexed shove and the door creaks open, revealing the standard miserable, damp, humid late morning, much after the manner of every single one of its predecessors in all of recorded time. Now, gathering about herself several errant outlying layers of her raiment, Minerva strides in her Birkenstocks across the muddy lawn towards the shed cowering in the far corner of the garden and, jerking open the door thereof, reveals the elderly gentleman skulking in the gloom at the low table within. The simpleton eyes behind their half-moon spectacles swivel upwards from their toil, and are fleetingly animated by the weakest of simpers. He sports today, as nearly always, a scarlet t-shirt emblazoned with the legend “Idiot Left Energy”, and worn, as it is with sickening frequency, over a green long-sleeved shirt. Minerva stares wordlessly. The cretinous gaze, no longer meeting her own, drops back down onto the table, upon which, part-assembled and already gimcracked, a toy windmill becomes. — toy windmill, Don Quicksotte’s shed

“I thought,” pipes Mr Don Quicksotte in a strained falsetto, “I thought I might see if I could persuade Gerrie and Val to take this one,” which not being dignified with a response, he squeakingly adds, “generally jolly breezy up there by the gorge, one would have thought.” — Don Quicksotte

Minerva, marching back across the lawn, regains the bungalow’s interior and, drenched in a mixture of rain and her own emanations, resumes her distrait Havishamian wandering between the chambers of the place. Her peregrinations take her eventually into the sitting room, over which resides a tall walnut-veneered horologe, incongruous if no more so than the rest of the bewilderingly eclectic and vey dusty furniture crowding the space. At this, exhibiting the marks of anxiety, she stares. But time is imperturbable, and must advance at its own infuriating pace, neither fast enough nor slow enough, whether she wills it or no. — Mangotsfield bungalow

Sad to relate, Dr Mark Wankstain is inescapably puny. No more than five foot six or seven in his Cuban heels, and sporting a hideously flared three-piece brown suit. Up at her he smiles one of those effeminate, mannered Henry James smiles. The thought, unbidden and unwelcome, assails his mother: a ponce. I brought into the world a ponce. This, with an effort, she pushes to the back of her mind. She opens her mouth to speak, but finds herself, to her consternation, burping. Dr Mark Wankstain, smiling through the embarrassment, opens his mouth. In contrast to his beldam, words emerge. — Dr Mark Wankstain

A second thought, as unwelcome as the first, makes itself known: dear God, he speaks Likeney. My own son. — Likeney

The Wankstain luggage crouches beside him on the gravel: two branded suitcases - Giovanni di Smegma or some such. — Dr Mark Wankstain

“We have always got by quite happily, your … er … father and I, with a silly old kettle for our organic fennel and gypsum tay. Nevertheless, we must move with the times, I quite see that. Room shall be made, the inconsequential bricabrac accreted during our life’s journey shall be swept aside, and your marvellous modern espresso machine duly accommodated.” — Espresso machine

But Dr Mark Wankstain, now in the vestibule, is of a sudden aflutter. — Dr Mark Wankstain

Eventually, Miss Minerva Ledwitch goes away and shuts herself in the bathroom. It is over now, this first meeting with her son. She leans against the sink, and in the mirror examines her faded features. — Herod

Her mind’s eye casts itself backwards to that time so long ago, to that blithe and girlish occasional photographer’s model stylishly languishing in the attic bedsit in the house on Fremantle Square. Trailing Quicksotte hangdog in her wake even then, sharing her bed because she let him out of some warped combination of boredom and insouciance and pity. What had become of that careless free-spirited vie bohème, that eternal summer of daisy chains and casual love and psychotropic drugging? A fumble in a studio with Monsieur l’Artiste, that’s what. Decidedly not the pale tubercular, that one. Hairy young silverback with his flashing black eyes and his curly dark gypsy bouffant and his shoelace necklaces, and his buttock-emphasising leather trousers, and his collarless shirt open all the way down to his navel. A dab hand at those whispered douceurs which ever had set her knees a-tremble, and for which, as she privately confessed to herself, she had a weakness still. And selfish. So selfish. But that is men. That is men all over, every one of them, even the best of them. Especially the best of them. Well, maybe not Quicksotte, but she took no account of that pathetic milquetoast. Took what he wanted, the artist, with vey little in the way of by-your-leave. Except for the leave-taking. So repellently and yet so irresistibly masculine. The burgeoning of the life inside her belly matched only by the brute’s growing dissatisfaction with his muse. From nowhere a pair of bushy eyebrows grew, and overhung those flashing eyes, and made them dull and dead. The canvas slashed, the statue broken, the abortion of Venus. And then that terrible morning when, gravid and exhausted, she had staggered away from the bedsit and Quicksotte’s cloying bafflement, and trudged through the pluvial slums and down past the allotments mouldering on the hillside, to the artist’s studio in St Werburghs, and found all shuttered, the milk festering on the doorstep, the semi-literate note pinned to the door. Ran away to India to find himself in an ashram, the rascal. So predictable, the orientalism. The much-trodden path of hypocrisy. Not that she was in any position to preach. — the statue, hypocrisy, St Werburghs, Fremantle Square, orientalism, the canvas